It is not uncommon for developers to find themselves in need of a UI component that is either not provided by the platform they are targeting or is, indeed, provided, but lacks a certain property or behavior. The answer to both scenarios is a custom UI component. The Android UI model is inherently customizable, offering…
Selecting the Right Android Library When choosing a library, I look for four key features: It provides a consistent and high-quality solution for a real and non-trivial problem. It uses as simple an API as possible. It does not force any changes in my overall architecture. It has a large user base and, preferably, an…
Every Android developer, at one point or another, needs to deal with threads in their application. When an application is launched in Android, it creates the first thread of execution, known as the “main” thread. The main thread is responsible for dispatching events to the appropriate user interface widgets as well as communicating with components…
Since Android was created, we app developers have been using SQLite to store our local data. Sometimes directly with SQL statements, sometimes using an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) as an abstraction layer, but either way, we’ve been using SQLite at the end of the day. Despite all of SQLite’s advantages, though, there were times when we…
Android devices have a lot of cores, so writing smooth apps is a simple task for anyone, right? Wrong. As everything on Android can be done in a lot of different ways, picking the best option can be tough. If you want to choose the most efficient method, you have to know what’s happening under…
The mobile app market is saturated with competition. Trends turn over quickly, but no niche can last very long without several competitors jumping onto the bandwagon. These conditions result in a high failure rate across the board for the mobile app market. Only 20% of downloaded apps see users return after the first use, whereas…
Figuring out how to pull the current flavor from gradle While working on an update for one of our games, I needed to figure out how to get the current flavor and use it in code. Since there are a lot of ways to do this, I chose to create a custom build config parameter and…
Did you know you can get the signing SHA1 and MD5 fingerprints within AndroidStudio? If you need the SHA1 or MD5 fingerprints of your Android debug/release key/certificate for a new API or framework that you want to integrate in your project like Firebase or Maps, then you can also get it from AndroidStudio. Follow the steps below…
The following snippet will help you generate a random number in Java that is between 2 numbers (min and max).
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static Random random = new Random(); /** * Min is inclusive and max is exclusive in this case **/ public static int randomBetween(int min, int max) { return random.nextInt(max - min) + min; } |
Please note that the min variable is inclusive in the results of this method while max is exclusive.